Comfortable in your own skin: becoming a trainee therapist of colour in the context of internalised racism

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Abstract

The thesis explores how internalised racism and a sense of professional
identity of a therapist of colour affect each other when starting counselling practice
with white clients. The fundamental concepts of the research are race, internalised
racism, racial identity, professional identity and the dynamic of racial identity and
professional identity in therapy. Autoethnography is the methodological approach
that is used to comprehend experiences of internalised racism and professional
identity. The autoethnographic approach is used in multiple ways through a layered
account that moves back and forth in time, and inward and outward between self and
culture, demonstrating how early encounters with racism during childhood in
Thailand interact with the experience of starting therapeutic practice with white
clients in Scotland. The goal is to facilitate readers’ understanding of, and empathy
with, the experiences of a therapist of colour who has internalised racism. Frantz
Fanon’s (1952/1991) work on internalised racism and the psychodynamic concepts
of transference, countertransference and projection are the main conceptual resources
employed to analyse the experiences narrated. The thesis demonstrates that
internalised racism influences a therapist of colour to perform whiteness, collude
with white clients in denial of racial difference, avoid challenging racial issues in
sessions, require white clients’ reassurance to prove the therapist’s competence, and
try to disprove white clients’ prejudgements about the therapist due to the therapist’s
race.